This was my first Dead show. I still have a large poster from it. I was in attendance and can state the show was not cut short. I owned the bootleg LP this was taken from. I bought it at a record at Brady & Farwell in Milwaukee. Too bad the entire performance isn't available.

Skipped due to evident historical quality limiters.

No Highlights

This show WAS oversold, and to add to that problem bootleg tickets were being sold in the weeks before the concert.To make matters worse,the doors were not opened until 15 minutes before show time, causing a stampede at the doors letting in many people who had no tickets.The venue finally got control of things and stopped letting people in. This was sour grapes for Pat Small,Amy Kirkland and a few of their friends who were not allowed to crash the party. In turn, they thought it would be "in everybody's best interest" to warn the fire department.Thus the show was cut short. However, this show was much longer than what's listed. OX opened,possibly (Michael and)The Messengers, (Pigpen was using Michael Morgan's organ -unless it was just on loan)and NRPS. It appears the Dead played at least two hours, A review in the local counterculture mag "Bugle American" lists Truckin' and seems to indicate it being played while tied into a few other songs. John Paris of Ox told me Jerry was very affable,talking and giving tips to the other local musicians on the bill before the Dead's set. Amy Kirkland,to the best of my memory was the head of the local YIP movement. Her argument was that the promoters intentionally let in ticketless fans to mask the fact that they oversold the show, thus having an excuse for the over capacity crowd.. The Expo Center held 2500, 5000 were estimated in the room. The end result was The Expo management deciding to never have another rock show there.A new venue at the time, this was the one and only concert ever held there. It continued as a convention center.

We also recorded this show on a cheap portable Panasonic (mono) tape recorder. That tape went missing many years ago. I will emphatical state, however, that the archive show represented here is not the entire set, because the set actually began with "Cold Rain and Snow." This site recording starts a few notes into "Me and My Uncle." I am positive about this.

Also, I would suggest that the Dead remarking that the show was terminated early because they had to catch a plane was probably contrived to avoid a crowd riot. The show had been oversold by twice the estimated capacity of 2500 (at $2.50 a ticket). There were approximately 5000 of us packed in as tightly as one could be, sitting on a hard concrete floor with no room to move.

I suspect the show was cut short by the local fire marshalls when they discovered how much the crowd exceeded the legal limit. The Dead had to catch a plane? They were literally across the street from the airport.

Also the show was a full afternoon festival featuring a local band called "Ox" (fronted by future long-time Johhny Winter bassist, Jon Paris) and followed by the New Riders of the Purple Sage (which, at that time, was a loose conglomeration of Dead musician-friends and members of the band (Garcia and Pigpen among them) on stage. This tour occured months before the NRPS Columbia Records debut.

Everything was pretty much on schedule - so the fact that the Dead only did a short 45 minutes set would not make sense. They would have certainly alotted a significant chunk of time for their set. And the fact that their set was completed before 8:00 would seem to indicate intervention from the local authorities, not a travel commitment.